submitted 11 months ago by I-Should-Travel@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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I'm gonna virtualize one of these sooner or later to get some networking hands-on experience for myself. While I don't plan to throw my current router in the trash day 1, how (not?) safe is it to switch over to using it as your router in the sense of making sure things like basic firewall protections and whatnot are up? Is it set and forget and you'd have to turn things off/create exceptions to create huge vulnerabilities, like anything else? Or do you have to build it all from the ground up and know what you're doing entirely?

Also, If down the line I wanted to ditch a router entirely, I'd still want wifi. Is that something where I just buy the cheapest router from amazon and have it only serve wifi, or is there some kind of way I can slap a wifi dongle into a usb port somewhere and have it transmit instead of receive?

Also feel free to have an argument about if I should start with pfsense or opnsense. Leaning toward opnsense since things I've read have implied it's a little easier to set up and start with, and they're similar enough I can always hop to the other.

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[-] RymdLord@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

Well depends on your current setup. If your current setup is a 1 WAN and 1 LAN(No Vlans) and your ISP doesn't use PPPoE or similar it should be out of the box good to go, exept you needing to maintain it aka update and monitor. You can setup auto updates but checking logs and maybe setting up IDS/IPS would be a good idea.

What do you mean "ditch a router" pf/opnsense are firewall/routers. If you want WiFi you will need a AP(Access Point) that can either be a dedicated AP like what Ubiquity offers or a WiFi router that allows you to disable all "router" features. As for dongles I would think that it's a bad idea. I personally use a Unifi 6 Lite that is running OpenWRT. Also I use Opnsense due to the hardware support and it having a better layout in my opinion also some nice to have plugins.

Also if I was you I would recommend OpenWRT it might be a better fit :)

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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023

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